‘I’VE BEEN PRETTY RESPONSIVE': A touchy Rep. Anthony Weiner yesterday refuses to answer questions about his penchant for linking to sexy online admirers like the one above. (Getty Images)

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It takes a certain type of woman to set his heart a-Twitter.

Rep. Anthony Weiner follows only a select 198 of his nearly 49,000 Twitter fans — and a surprising number of them are total babes.

Yesterday, outside his DC office, the model-loving, married congressman testily refused to talk about the pretty women he’s following.

He flashed a tight, uncomfortable smile and avoided eye contract as he tried to deflect point-blank questions from reporters about whether or not he had sent a crotch shot of himself in underwear to a 21-year-old co-ed in Seattle.

“Was it from you or not,” demanded CNN’s Capitol Hill producer Ted Barrett.

To which the squirming Weiner replied:

“If I were giving a speech to 45,000 people and someone in the back threw a pie or yelled out an insult, I would not spend the next two hours of my speech responding to that pie or that insult.

“I would return to the things that I want to talk about to the audience that I want to talk to. That is what I intend to do this week.”

Then in another cringeworthy exchange, the Brooklyn-Queens Democrat unloaded a snarky insult instead of saying why he didn’t pass on to Capitol Police his claim that his Twitter account had been hacked — which would be a federal crime.

“I’m going to have to ask that we follow some rules here. One of them is going to be you ask questions and I’ll do the answers. That seem reasonable? . . . You do the questions, I do the answers, and this jackass interrupts me?” a fuming Weiner said of Barrett.

But reporters persisted, asking Weiner if he followed the co-ed on Twitter and whether he had other “young women followers” — with one barking: “Answer the question!”

Instead, the famously temperamental Weiner looked annoyed, rolled his shoulders and argued — but never said whether or not he sent the picture.

“This is now Day Three,” he intoned. “You have statements that my office has put out. And there are going to be people . . . this is the tactic. The guy in the back of the room who’s throwing the pie or yelling out the insult wants that to be the conversation.”

He took more tacks than a sailboat as he tried to not explain the Twitter tempest.

“Look, this was a prank that I’ve now been talking about for a couple of days,” he said. “I’m not going to allow it to decide what I talk about for the next week or the next two weeks.

“And so, I’m not going to be giving anything more about that today. I think I’ve been pretty responsive.”

Though visibly angry — and often combative — the congressman tried to squeeze in one lame joke, bragging that he “passed [Tea Party favorite Rep.] Michele Bachmann today in the number of Twitter followers. I will give you that fact.”

Weiner’s sultry stable of fans should come as no surprise. Every year, he begs the State Department to give red-hot international runway models more travel visas.

Weiner generally follows women who send him Twitter messages to cheer him on — usually over one of his many appearances on TV to champion the left — and he then replies with an offer:

“Thanks so much for following me. Would you like me to follow you? Use #WeinerYes,” he writes.

He has even sent private Twitter messages to porn star Ginger Lee, who once tweeted, “You know it’s a good day when you wake up to a [direct message] from @RepWeiner.”

It appears that Weiner no longer follows her account. She declined comment.

Most people Weiner follows are connected to politics, the media or professional sports.

And some of the sweet young things he follows say they’re surprised.

“He tweeted me back asking if I thought it was all right if he could follow me. I was flattered he wanted to follow me back. I’m not in politics,” New Jersey nurse Nicole Aquino told The Post. “I followed him originally.”

Yesterday, pretty Gennette Nicole Cordova, the Seattle co-ed, tried to explain why she got the racy underwear crotch snapshot, which, Weiner had insisted when the story first broke, was sent by someone who had hacked his account.

“Actually, I became a fan after I saw him demolish Bachmann on Hannity about 2 months ago. It was great,” Cordova posted on her Twitter page.

At first bewildered by all the attention, Cordova, a journalism student at Whatcom Community College in Bellingham, Wash., pulled down her Twitter and Facebook pages and said she had never met Weiner in person.

She then resumed her online presence and appeared bemused by the attention.

“This is teaching me an invaluable lesson about the importance of journalistic ethics and standards,” she tweeted.

But she later told The Post the spotlight has been taking a toll on her.

“I am pretty sick right now and it’s only getting worse with the stress,” she wrote in an e-mail.

She even dropped her journalism class, according to Toby Sonnenman, faculty adviser to her school paper, Horizon.

“I was stunned at just how fast the story spread — how fast it became from a person I knew on my staff to a national story,” Sonnenman said.

Weiner follows other young female fans from across the country, including lovely ladies in Florida, California and Texas.